Donald Trump Refuses To Unite The US, & It's His Most Dangerous Quality

The 2016 election gave rise to an America more deeply divided than it's been at perhaps any time in the last 150 years. True, brothers have yet to literally face off on the battlefield, but they're unfriending each other on Facebook and canceling holiday get-togethers. It's the responsibility of our elected leaders to bring us together again, but Donald Trump refuses to unite the U.S. With each hateful tweet he sends out, he's only driving the wedge deeper and deeper. Trump's transition team has not responded to Romper's request for comment regarding how he will unify the country after his seemingly divisive tweets.

Let me be clear; I'm not merely characterizing his tweets as hateful because I'm a sore loser. As of the time this was published, eight of his last 10 tweets were negative, and this certainly isn't a new trend. Meanwhile, I scrolled through President Barack Obama's feed all the way through mid-October (mind you, he tweets less in a month than Trump tweets in a day), and the most negative thing I could find was a link to a Washington Post article about climate change with a warning that "Denial is dangerous." Trump, meanwhile, is busy calling people "clowns" and taunting North Korea. His version of reaching across the aisle was to wish his "many enemies" a happy new year, all while his supporters spam his replies with ads for "liberal tears" coffee mugs.

But rather than try to reassure those who oppose him that he's ready to be a "president for all Americans," as he promised in his victory speech, he repeatedly characterizes them as enemies. The New Year's Eve tweet was nothing new; he's been tweeting about his enemies for years. In 2010, Obama once casually used the word "enemies" to refer to those who politically oppose others, and then-House Minority Leader John Boehner was positively horrified, addressing the incident with a prepared speech in which he admonished, "Mr. President, there's a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defense of freedom, the Constitution, and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don't call them 'enemies.' We call them 'patriots.'" I can't imagine Trump ever calling an opponent a "patriot," and that's deeply disturbing. The U.S. has been torn apart, and Trump seemingly has no plans to mend it.